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Electric cars are amazing, right? Everything about them is a straight upgrade to Internal Combust Engine (ICE) vehicles?
tl;dr is they're (mostly) not terrible! They are their own kind of shitty though. And Elon Musk is a fuckhead.
There are big drawbacks - like pretty much anything a corporation sells you
There's a lot of drawbacks, and when you consider the main selling point to be one of environmentalism; this is more a triumph of marketing, public manipulation and outright lies. Electric cars are the consumer recycling of transportation. They take their environmental impact and transport it outside of the consumer sightline. This is a magic trick. The rabbit still exists. It's just backstage. This analogue is too laboured.
The general thrust of the development and deployment of electric cars is PROBABLY a net good. But you know what they are way worse than? Efficient, affordable mass transit. Bikes. Living close to your workplace. And also a lot of existing petrol-based cars.
Trams, trains and buses are way, way, way, way better for the environment / society / civilisation than personal electric cars.
And while they don't even make the 'best' electric cars just a note that if you drive a Tesla we all think you suck ass as a person, and have a tiny dick (or a huge pussy? I think that's the correct corollary).
Anyway shout out to the 16 Tesla workers who came to my Melbourne Comedy Festival show as a group one night. You're all great. I'm sorry that Elon Musk is a fuckhead and none of this is targeted at you directly:
Sidenote! Tesla Sucks & Elon Musk Has Never Invented or Founded Anything
Tesla was founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. The company was incorporated in 2003 but they were working on it before that. Nikola Tesla is awesome. Edison was a manipulative asshole and Tesla was a generous, inspiring genius.
In 2004, Elon Musk bought his way in (using money from his daddy's apartheid-era emerald mines and various grifting). He's the Edison to Eberhard and Tarpenning's Tesla.
In Musk's regular manner of sweaty hubris he forced / bribed / bullied his way into being legally allowed to call himself a 'co-founder' of the company - WAY after its founding. He's as much a founder of Tesla as he is a founder of Twitter. Side-sidenote about Twitter coming after this side-note.
This is Musk's regular business strategy; recognising when something has value; buying his way in, CRATERING the actual value of the asset WHILE increasing its perceived / imagined / imaginary / share value through a combination of PR stunts and borderline (or legitimately) illegal actions. This works because the stock market has long been divorced from reality, which is why NVIDIA and the AI corps are currently valued so highly.
In this way he creates ‘value' (meaning money, or the idea of money - which stock holdings are, or imaginary money where he borrows AGAINST stock holdings, which should very much not be a legal move) for himself and the shareholder class, and damages every single person outside of it. Whether or not you are personally invested in the stock market, their machinations affect the global economy. And not in a good way.
Here's a great clip from Trevor Noah breaking down the exploited mechanism he used to borrow against his Tesla shares to buy Twitter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J38C7F86tro
And if you are invested in one of his bullshit companies? Well in most cases you'll be suffering quite directly, because the real share value is the insider trading we did all along.
Side-Sidenote on Twitter
Elon Musk never wanted to buy Twitter. He was being a troll when he made an offer as a 'joke' (let's be charitable and call what he thinks are jokes, jokes - because after 13 years of being a standup I can tell you that many, many, many jokes are not funny).
Because he is a dumbcunt (I'm deliberately combining these into one word in the Australian definition; a dumbcunt is a particular kind of dumb person, and a particular kind of cunt; Elon is in fact dumb, and a cunt, and a dumbcunt) Elon was too stupid to realise his joke about buying twitter took the form of a legally enforceable promise to do so.
He tried and tried to wriggle and writhe his way out of the purchase, because he had offered far more than the real value of the platform and didn't have the money to follow through on his insane purchase on a money-losing enterprise.
Now, ultimately he was able to borrow against his Tesla shares (without selling them, which should not be legal, obviously - share value is by definition unstable) to borrow enough that he COULD put enough money into the deal he had shitposted himself into being on the hook for.
He then looked at his new money-losing asset, and, because he is a massive dumbcunt, thought he knew how to "fix" it. This is a very similar mindset to Trump and the tariffs. He soooort of understood a little bit of half an idea, and because he is such a dumbcunt, he thought that meant he was a genius and had broken the matrix. This is like when I used to do nangs (nitrous oxide or at other times carbon dioxide) and while my brain was starved of oxygen I thought I understood the universe in a fundamental and insightful way that was normally denied me. Actually I was just actively being really fucking stupid.
He proceeded to fire every good engineer he had (omg this idiot - he legit started firing coders who wrote less lines. The less lines you write to solve problems THE BETTER AT CODING YOU ARE, YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKER) in order to 'cut costs' and also got rid of every moderator / community safety person because creating a safe environment is "woke", rebranded it "X" (because he's been trying to make every company he ever worked on into "X" - he just loves that letter yes its white-supremacy coded but I guarantee you he mostly just likes the look of it I've known multiple other dumbcunts over the years who think X is the 'coolest' letter), and just generally made the whole place a trashfire. Twitter, or Xitter, or X if you are Muskrat sucks now. There's a lot of other ways he degraded its value we don't need to get into here.
Luckily for him, manipulating other dumbcunts can be extremely profitable through the mechanism of crypto farming. I don't mean mining. I mean farming your dumbcunts! By convincing them to invest in specific crypto that you are pumping and dumping.
Side-side-side note on Crypto
Cryptocurrency operates on the 'greater fool theory', which is essentially that as long as you can find someone dumber than you - you can profit from them. It's multi-level marketing with extra tech steps,
Crypto has NO value (and yes in a way this is true of traditional currency but not really). Crypto ACTUALLY has no value. If anything its value is negative, because for it to continue to exist, it needs to actively create pollution and use electricity, which accelerates climate change.
Crypto's VALUE is in its ability to get people to give you real money for it. Elon and all the other crypto cunts use it to extract actual wealth from poor people, who would like to be billionaires please. It's not toooo dissimilar from the stock market derivatives that caused the worldwide economic collapse of 2008.
Anyway, I'm like 4 sidenotes in at this point suffice to say crypto is gambling; yes there are people who win at gambling; no unless you are The House you are not guaranteed to make money gambling (whatever your system that you invented).
Let's get back to Sidenote 1, which is Tesla.
They're a fundamentally cunty company. Which makes sense because Elon Musk is a cunt, an also one of the unfunniest cunts who's ever lived, which makes it really quite silly how much he's desperate for people to think he's funny.
They're also union busters, which I can never stomach. Here's a great article about them doing that:
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/corporate-power-approaches-escape
Any time you see a corporation is busting unions you should stop giving them money. The big fight for power in our world today is not against governments; it's against corporations.
And labour organising is a necessary counterweight to their cunty accumulation of capital and power which harms to the public AND their workforces. Again, I am loving not having to write “seggs” and “unalive” and all that algo-riding bullshit. Cunt.
Sidenote to the sidenote Fuck Union-busters
Rockstar Games (the makers of the upcoming GTA 6) are cunty anti-worker union busters and I highly encourage you to pirate GTA 6 instead of paying for it. I stopped stealing games many years ago now but I am going to re-learn how to do this just because fuck Rockstar.
I stopped paying for Netflix because of how they acted during the writer's strike and the actor's strike and how generally shitty they've been for the industry in general (they led the charge to cut writers rooms in half, and essentially deleted residuals for actors / writers / showrunners) in a way that made the whole industry way more precarious. I really like TV shows and films and the people who create them so if you fuck with them I am going to stop giving you cash.
Fuck em. Torrent your shows over giving these vampires your money.
Back to Electric Cars, Finally.
Just because you don't SEE the costs, doesn't mean they aren't there. Obvious parallel to degenerative AI you can fill in yourselves.
Built-in Costs
Any consumer product (including cars) have a cost-to-consumer (sticker price) but an entirely different TOTAL COST to [produce - consume - dispose] end to end. It is the job of a business to extract profit, so generally speaking they want to minimise their direct costs and maximise their direct revenue; this creates profit. So their goal at every point is to minimise the costs TO THEM while increasing the revenue TO THEM and everyone else affected can go get fucked.
Socialise the cost; privatise the profit.
Cost isn't money. And value isn't money. Money is an inaccurate system for resource tracking and distribution, and it isn't the point of a fucking life. Yes it sucks not to have money. No money is not a way to 'keep score'.
Corporations have been doing an awesome job this last 50 or so years training consumers to look only at the 'last mile' of pollution and resource cost in terms of when a product gets to us, and what we do with it.
The oil came from fracking? A term & technique so obvious fucked its literally the euphemism for "fuck" in Battlestar Galactica? Don't worry about it! You can't see it!
Recycling is kind of bullshit and the huge majority of things you put INTO the recycling just end up in a landfill or in the middle of the ocean anyway? And these corporations could take a VERY slight hit on their profits to package things sustainably (as in, ACTUALLY recyclable like using glass bottles instead of plastic, and taking some vague sense of responsibility on collections and costs) but refuse to do so because it's more important for the share price to go up than to live in a world moderately less fucked? SHUT UP YOU'RE A WOKE LEFTY FUCKTARD.
You know, I am starting to much prefer writing for my own website over social media. I cannot imagine 'fucktard' getting past algo filters.
Rare earth metals for electric car motors & batteries
Rare earth metals (defined as such because they are either very limited on our planet, or their accessibility to us without massively destructive, and unprofitable, mining is limited) are essential for the manufacture of electric vehicles. Approximately 5-10kg of rare earth metals are required for every electric car (roughly double that of non-electric vehicle).
As electric vehicles become more popular the demand for the components to manufacture them accelerates, which drives further increases to a habitat and ecologically destructive mining industry, which accelerates and hastens climate change (any time you destroy natural ecology you end up releasing carbon into the atmosphere - more or less we can say living or buried organic matter = less carbon in the atmosphere; burned up or dead and degrading organic matter = more carbon in the atmosphere. More carbon = higher temperatures & climate instability = more dying stuff = more carbon etc. etc.) let's not teach you to suck carbon-emitting eggs.
Electric vehicles are heavier, which creates more damage to the roads
Electric Vehicles (EVs) are about 25% - 30% heavier than an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle, on average. Have you noticed a lot more road damage in your area? Extra-heavy vehicles create more pressure on the roads. Extra pressure creates more damage. Suddenly the same amount of repair can't keep up. And in a lot of jurisdictions the fuel tax directly goes to funding these repairs, which means electric cars are not only causing more damage to the roads, but they are also limiting the funds required to repair them.
Final Thoughts
Okay I’ve run out of steam. Probably electric cars are better. Don't buy one from Tesla. Fuck union busters.